internet censorship – Shivam Vij

Swachh Internet: Why we must support Ravi Shankar Prasad in filtering internet porn

19 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

First published in Scroll.in on 9 January 2015.

I was initially opposed to the idea of India blocking all online porn, but I have changed my mind.

In 2013, a lawyer named Kamlesh Vaswani filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India demanding that all pornography on the internet should be blocked by the government of India. Vaswani argued, among other things, that seeing images of people having sex makes men want to commit rape and other crimes such as sex-trafficking. Continue reading “Swachh Internet: Why we must support Ravi Shankar Prasad in filtering internet porn” →

The discreet charms of the nanny state

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published in Tehelka, in the issue dated 14 October 2006.

On 29 June this year, the Department of Telecom of the Ministry of India’s Communication and Information Technology asked some 150 Internet Servive Providers to block access to the website of the People’s War Group, www.geocities.com/cpimlpwg. Exactly a month later, the DoT issues another letter informing ISPs that “M/S Yahoo! Inc.” (which runs Geocities) had removed the PWG site anyway, and so all ISPs were requested to make sure that Geocities per se was not blocked.

This is the first time a provider of Internet services has agreed to the Indian government’s demand of completely removing a particular website, thus establishing a dangerous precedent. Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft do this regularly for China and other countries, with the difference that it is public knowledge there, and these companies come under attack from free speech activists the world over. Continue reading “The discreet charms of the nanny state” →

Indian artist jailed for anticorruption cartoons

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published on 10 September 2012 in The Christian Science Monitor.

NEW DELHI — A political cartoonist in India has been arrested on charges of sedition, violating an online content law, and insulting national honor for a series of cartoons sharply critical of corruption in the government.

Aseem Trivedi’s arrest Saturday took place nine months after he displayed the cartoons at a demonstration in Mumbai calling for the creation of an anticorruption ombudsman in the Indian government to punish officials for graft. Continue reading “Indian artist jailed for anticorruption cartoons” →

Are internet service providers blocking blogs?

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published on 17 July 2006 in Rediff.com.

Bloggers in India are getting together to protest against the sudden blocking of popular Google-owned blog-hosting site Blogger by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Spectranet, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), Reliance Powersurfer, Airtel Broadband and Sify. Continue reading “Are internet service providers blocking blogs?” →

This troll has a very long nose

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published in Outlook magazine, in the issue dated 21 January 2013.

IRONICALLY, the random arrest of people for tweets or Facebook postings made some of us happy—happy that, at last, citizens have started showing concern about internet censorship. But lock-up gates had to clang at night on the faces of a few people before we realised that, in our pompous democracy, the might of the state is Ctrl-Alt-Deleting opinion with such serious zeal. The arrests have been made under Section 66A of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, notified in October 2009. This section makes punishable with up to three years’ imprisonment anything that is perceived as “grossly offensive” but does not set out the parameters of how to decide on that—even if we were to believe that could at all be done. Questions about these arrests are deflected: the government blames the police, the police says a vague law is the problem, and those who file the complaints that lead to such arrests say that they are free to seek enforcement of an existing law. Continue reading “This troll has a very long nose” →

India’s skewed internet censorship debate

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published on 30 August 2012 in Rediff.com.

Recent debates on internet censorship in India have focussed on the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. Continue reading “India’s skewed internet censorship debate” →

Gag reflex

6 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published in the October 2012 issue of The Caravan.

THE FIRST AMENDMENT to the Indian Constitution, passed in 1951, allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on a citizen’s right to freedom of speech and expression, in order to protect “the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”.

The means to impose these “reasonable restrictions” are described in several sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc). Section 298 of the IPC makes punishable words uttered “with the deliberate intent of wounding religious feelings”; section 504 addresses “intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace”; section 153 makes punishable speech acts that lead or could have led to rioting; section 295A could land you in jail for three years over “deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings”; section 153B permits the punishment of speech acts that question any social, religious or linguistic group’s allegiance to the Constitution of India or that such a group be denied Constitutional rights. Continue reading “Gag reflex” →

Web of deceit

6 January 20156 January 2015 Shivam VijLeave a comment

Published in the July 2012 issue of The Caravan.

THE ONGOING STRUGGLE to protect the Internet from censorship in India has begun to attract much-needed attention, and not a moment too soon. But a series of recent developments that has placed the issue on the radar of the national and international media also reveals the increasing complexity of the issue, and the ease with which interested parties can manipulate an opaque system to block access to sites of their own choosing—the dawning of a new era of “private” censorship.

Previously, it seemed that the principal obstacle to online freedom of expression in India was our own government, which has for several years ordered blocks on allegedly “controversial” websites and exerted pressure on companies like Google and Facebook to remove content that government officials deem “defamatory” or “inflammatory”. But it is now clear that the government is only one of several hurdles to free expression online, along with entertainment companies, courts, Internet service providers (ISPs) and even Internet companies themselves. Continue reading “Web of deceit” →

India’s skewed internet censorship debate

30 April 20122 January 2019 Shivam VijLeave a comment

(First published by Rediff.com on 30 April 2012.)

By Shivam Vij in New Delhi: